


We'll Go Back

by story_monger



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Platonic Cuddling, Team as Family, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 02:37:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7959073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've officially been defenders of the universe for four whole years, according to Earth time. It's one anniversary Pidge wishes she didn't have to think about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Go Back

**Author's Note:**

> My first contribution to this fandom, and it's a whole gravy boat of angst. Though the whole premise of the show is child soldiers being thrown into galactic warfare far away from home, so, there's that. 
> 
> Enjoy!

On the fourth anniversary of their first finding Shiro, first finding the Blue Lion, first exiting the solar system via an alien wormhole, no one says a word about it.

Well, no, to be fair, Pidge is half sure that she’s the only one aware of the date. As far as she knows, no one else bothered to set up a program that calculates the supposed time and date back on Earth. Pidge did it a long time ago, sometime in their first year. She cornered Coran one day after training and asked him to tell her everything he knew about time’s behavior across massive distances.

“Well certainly,” Coran had said pleasantly. “Though it can be quite mind-baffling. It might take several weeks to get the basic sweep.”

“That’s fine,” Pidge had said. “I mainly want to set up an clock that’ll be true to Earth time.” Coran’s face had sank into obvious sympathy, and Pidge had resisted scowling at him for it.

Still, Coran was an excellent teacher and Pidge was a dedicated learner. Some of the especially advanced Altean understanding of theoretical physics got daunting at times, but Pidge got the gist of it in the end. And she got her Earth clock in the form of a small program on her laptop.

She tries not to pull it up often. It’s too strange to stumble in from another day of training only to realize it’s technically Christmas morning at home. Because then Pidge starts thinking about her mom left alone and the hot, surging feelings threatens to override her. And then there’s time dilation. Time moves out of step on a planet versus on a spaceship jumping through wormholes; that’s classic Einstein. Pidge doesn’t like the idea that she’s aging slower than her mom, slower than everyone else she ever knew on Earth. It creeps her out. So she leaves the clock alone, generally.

She does pull up the clock on a whim a few days before the anniversary, which is how she catches it. She startles first when she sees the year because the display tells her they’re now in the 2180s. A whole new decade. There must be a new president, new trends and movies. Three cadets gone missing from the Garrison must be well-worn and forgotten news. When Pidge shifts her attention to the date, her heart sinks so hard and fast it’s borderline startling. Two more days, and it will have been four years according to Earth. That’s a little over five years of Matt and dad in captivity, and Pidge has to undergo mental acrobatics so that thought doesn’t shut her down completely.

But it bothers her, enough so that she knows people take notice. Her connection with her teammates has developed to something that’s not as blatant as telepathy, but it’s an undercurrent of awareness about what everyone is feeling, what everyone is thinking about. It’s brilliant for teamwork and battles, but it makes it hard to sink into a bad mood without Lance draping an arm over her shoulders more often or Shiro sitting longer with her on the couch in the evenings. No one outright _says_ they can tell she’s feeling down, but Pidge isn’t an idiot.

On the anniversary itself, Pidge sits in her room and watches the clock inch from March 20 to March 21. When the date switches, she slaps her laptop shut and stands too quickly. She leaves the laptop in her bedroom and strides down to the main storage room where the rest of the team, sans Hunk, is preparing for the next mission. She comes halfway down the stairway and then settles down, watching her team give each other haircuts and rifle through clothes. The haircuts are mostly for the sake of Shiro, Keith, and Lance, who have been elected to accompany Allura on a diplomatic visit to the planet currently swirling blue and faint lilac beneath them. The planet is the political center of one of the last major systems still free from Galran rule. The Yesif people, they’ve been busy discovering, are a proud and unyielding people. They’ve been doing just fine keeping the Galran empire off their backs for millennia, and they see no reason to draw the empire’s ire by allying with Voltron. The diplomatic team hopes to meet with the Yesif Central Parliament and plead their case that Voltron would be more a boon than a burden. Allura, who has the most experience with these kinds of dealings, is clouded in a faintly nervous energy that tells Pidge the trip’s success is far, far from a given. There’s a reason they’re leaving Pidge, Hunk, and Coran in orbit; things could get sour extremely quickly, and they’ll need a fast exit readily available.

“You don’t mind being the cavalry, do you?” Shiro had asked Pidge the day before, after a team meeting spent going over logistics and trying to plan for possible outcomes.

“Me? Nah,” Pidge had said. She’d grinned. “I bet Keith wishes he could switch with me or Hunk, though. Watch, he’s going to find a way to suggest it.”

Shiro had chuckled. “Keith knows it makes sense. You’re too valuable up here, and Hunk is still recovering.” He’d paused. “He’ll just think it very, very loudly.”

Now, Pidge is torn between amusement and pity at the utter resignation radiating off of Keith while Shiro gives his hair a trim and the room fills with chattering discussion about the minutia of proper presentation. Pidge isn’t sure why he’s acting so hopeless; he’s not a _bad_ diplomat by any stretch of the imagination. He has this knack for being quiet at just the right times, in just the right ways, that people start spilling things on their own accord. Pidge has seen it in action; it’s impressive. She tries to tell him as much, hoping he can't hear the strain in her voice.

“I start blabbering out of nerves,” Pidge explains. “You wait it out, and they come to _you_.”

“It’s only because I don’t know what to say,” Keith says stiffly. “So I listen instead.”

“Right!” Pidge nods encouragingly. “You know how hard it can be for some people to shut up and listen?”

Keith shrugs, but his nerves sag a bit. It’s short-lived; Pidge feels them ratchet right back up when Allura starts talking about the proper way to arrange their hands so they don’t accidentally do the Yesif equivalent of flipping off the whole parliament.

“I think these guys just need to lighten up,” Lance calls out from where he’s helping Coran sift through the castle’s small stock of diplomacy-worthy clothing. Pidge finds herself agreeing.

“Doesn’t matter what we think,” Shiro says, holding a clump of Keith’s dark hair between his fingers and snipping off ragged ends. (No one was especially surprised to learn Shiro can cut hair and make it look decent. It’s _Shiro_.) “We’re on their turf and we have to play by their rules.” He glances at Lance. “Which means no trying to slip in jokes.”

“No one will get them,” Lance protests, but Shiro gives him a look and Lance shrugs before holding up a long, red robe and saying, “Hey, Keith, I think I got your piece.”

“That has a lace collar,” Keith says, sounding vaguely like a man facing the guillotine. “Why can’t we wear our armor?”

“And what kind of message would it send if we showed up looking like we expect a fight?” Allura points out.

“We can tailor it if it really bothers you,” Shiro says placidly. He runs his fingers through Keith’s hair a few more times and says, “That should be good.” Keith mumbles his thanks and stands to join Coran and Lance. Shiro looks up at Pidge.

“You want to go next? Might as well get everyone done while we have the shears out.”

Pidge hesitates, one hand coming up to her hair. It’s gotten long; not as long as she had it before the Garrison, but definitely not cropped anymore. She’d forgotten how longer hair frames her face differently, gives it a more feminine edge. And frankly, after four years without hormone blockers, she can use help in that department. Puberty’s smacked her full force with the stubble and the Adam’s apple and everything. Most days she doesn’t care, but sometimes it hits her, hard, and she’s left feeling off kilter all day.

“Nah,” she says. “I’m going to keep growing it out.”

“Okay,” Shiro says. “What if I just take care of the split ends, then?”

Pidge hesitates, thinking, then shrugs in acquiescence and pushes to a stand. She clatters down the rest of the stairs and takes Keith’s place in the small metal chair. She leans back as Shiro’s fingers start to comb through her hair, pulling out the tangles. She feels herself relaxing.

“Have you seen Hunk at all today?” Shiro asks, separating her hair out into sections.

“Mm, just at breakfast,” Pidge hums. “He’s mostly sleeping today.”

“Good,” Shiro says. Pidge catches the edge of Shiro’s worry, and it melds in with her own. It isn’t that Hunk’s injuries from their latest battle were the worst they’ve seen, but they were up there. It had taken him five whole days in the healing pod before he was safe to emerge, and even then he’d been distinctly quiet and un-Hunklike. She’ll have to check on him once the rest are on their way out.

She falls into quiet contemplation of her hands folded in her laps, listening to the snip of Shiro’s shears and Allura rattling off nuances of Yesif society and Coran trying to persuade Keith that this robe really was the height of Altean fashion back in _his_ day. It’s the sound of her people, her family, and she tries to remind herself that if she was going to be banished from Earth for years—maybe decades; who knows when they can go back home?—at least it was with these guys.

“You doing okay?” It’s Shiro, speaking low enough for the others not to hear. He runs his fingers through her hair again, and this time Pidge doesn’t think it’s because of tangles.

“No,” she says, blunt, because there’s less than zero sense in lying about it.

Snip. Snip. “Want to talk about it?”

God. He really is such a dad sometimes, and Pidge almost rolls her eyes in amusement and fondness. “It’s nothing serious,” she says. “It’s just—“ She hesitates then, because as much as she feels cut off and scrambled by their distance from Earth, she’s sure Shiro must feel it even more keenly. The mission to Kerberos alone would have been disorienting and then add a gulf of lost memories in Galran captivity. Damn it, she needs to remember these things before she opens her mouth.

“Whatever it is that’s bothering you, you don’t have play the ‘who had it worse’ game,” Shiro says. Pidge coughs out a dry laugh. Fucking almost-but-not-quite-telepathy magic space powers. She doubts she’ll ever get completely used to it.

“It’s March 21, 2180 back at home right now,” she says. Shiro is quiet, and she can almost hear him trying to remember if that’s someone's birthday or anniversary or a national holiday. “It’s the date we first saw your ship crash land near the Garrison,” she says. “So it’s been four years.”

Shiro’s hands still for a moment. “Ah,” he says. He sifts his fingers through Pidge’s hair again, this time with an air of contemplation. “It feels longer.”

“I know, right?” Pidge shifts in the chair. “Feels like decades.”

“I guess that means I’m almost 30,” Shiro muses.

“Old man.” She snorts when he bops her head with his shears.

“Show some respect for your elders.”

“You’re not that much elder. Allura and Coran, they’re the elders.”

“True.” Pidge feels Shiro’s attention shift, and she follows it to the other end of the room. Allura has left off of her lecture and is now circling Keith, who has finally been coerced into trying on the red robe. Lance looks as if his birthday and the last day of school have been rolled into one. Coran looks pleased. Allura looks worried as she picks at places where the fabric doesn’t quite fit. Keith looks about as thrilled as a wet cat and keeps tugging at where the lace collar scratches against his neck. Pidge half laughs—she can’t help it—and Shiro echoes her.

He finishes trimming her hair in silence, but when he’s done, he places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes once. She lifts her own hand to meet his and squeezes back.

***

Pidge stays by Coran’s side and watches the Blue Lion sink toward the planet below.

“Don’t worry about them,” Coran says in that voice he uses when he’s trying very hard to be blustery and optimistic. “The Yesif are not a _violent_ culture; our lot aren’t in danger of being burnt alive like that one time.” Pause. “Though, the Yesif do like to put people in detention facilities, and the paperwork involved in getting them out would take…well, months. Not that they couldn’t fight their way out of an arrest, theoretically, but doing so would essentially end any chances of an alliance and…” He trails off, stroking his moustache and frowning.

“If they get put into a detention facility,” Pidge says pragmatically, “I’ll just hack the system and sneak them out.”

Coran glances sideways at her. “I sincerely hope it does not come to that.”

“That’s two of us,” Pidge says, clapping Corn’s shoulder. “I’d better make sure Hunk’s doing all right. Do you need me on the deck?”

“Not at the moment,” Coran sighs. “But if something happens, please make sure you can get here quickly.”

“’Course.” She claps Coran’s shoulder one more time in encouragement and heads for the doorway that leads to the living quarters. She stops by the kitchen first, digging around the fridge (not technically a fridge because it’s room temperature, but it’s where they store fresh food, so it’s the fridge) until she finds a container of leftovers. She grabs several packs of water and carries the load down the hall to the dormitories.

She stops outside of Hunk’s door and presses her hand once against a small glass square. A tone sounds from inside the room, and a second later, Pidge hears a low grunt.

“Hunk?” she calls. “I’ve got food and water.” A second grunt, and Pidge presses her hand against the square again, this time keeping it there. The door slides open.

Pidge has always liked Hunk’s room. He was the first to start decorating in earnest, gathering art and souvenirs from the various places they’ve visited over the years. Pidge’s favorite piece is a massive tapestry from a small moon they had defended two years ago. Voltron had successfully kept a small Galra fleet from overtaking the moon, and its inhabitants had been so grateful they’d heaped gifts on the crew. Among the gifts had been the massive, intricately woven tapestry featuring daily life for the moon’s inhabitants, and Hunk had taken a shine to it. It now hangs across one entire wall, providing an explosion of jewel tones in an otherwise sterile space.

The tapestry’s colors are muted at the moment by the lack of light. Pidge has to shuffle so she doesn’t trip over clothes or half-finished projects. When she finally reaches Hunk’s bedside, he’s only visible as a darker lump of sheets. His breathing is still too ragged for Pidge’s comfort; she’s convinced one of the blasters nicked a lung.

“Hey,” Pidge breathes, setting the food and water on the bedside table. She gropes until she finds a shoulder. “Hey, Hunk. How’re you feeling?”

Hunk inhales deeply, shifts. “Tired,” croaks a thin voice.

“I’ll bet,” she says.

“I didn’t know I could be this tired.”

“You got all shot up, Hunk, that’s going to take something out of you.”

“Shiro got shot up that one time and he was back in the seat in a few days.”

“Shiro has a hero complex that makes him do stupid shit like act as if he’s fine when he should be in bed.” She’s rewarded with Hunk’s tired snort, and she grins, rubbing his shoulder. “Have you eaten today?”

“Breakfast. Stayed down at least.”

“I got you some of that rice-ish stuff from a few days ago.”

Hunk doesn’t move then says in a small voice, “I’m not hungry.” Pidge wrinkles her nose; this is bad.

“Well, that’s fine,” she says with a false sense of cheer. “It’ll keep until you’re ready. You should drink the water, though.”

“I know.” Hunk heaves a sigh. “I’m tired of this bed. I’ve been in bed for literally two days. I’m gonna get sores.”

Pidge hums. “Well, I can get some blankets and stuff and set you up somewhere else in the castle, so you could at least sleep somewhere different.”

Hunk seems to turn the thought over before saying, “I guess that sounds good.”

“Awesome,” Pidge nods even though Hunk can’t see her. “Come on, I know the perfect spot.”

***

Thousands of years ago, when the castle was a fully functioning ship with the right-sized crew, Pidge imagines the secondary engine room was bustling with activity. Now, it’s quiet save for the low hum of the ship’s auxiliary engine, stationed in a massive room with catwalks all along its walls and ceiling. The room has a single, thick-paned window, and along that window runs one of the major walkways. It’s a quiet place, good for thinking and working on projects, and it’s where Pidge takes Hunk once she can coax him there.

“You sure I can put more weight on you?” Hunk asks as they enter the room and the operating lights flick on with a soft, blue flow.

“Hunk, I’m not fourteen anymore, and I’ve been spending four years training under Allura and Shiro’s combined forces.”

Hunk mutters something, but the arm slung around Pidge’s shoulders sags a bit more, and she straightens to take on the weight. She likes that she can do that. Being the tiniest member of the crew had been, at times, a bit of a drag. But she hit her growth spurt two years ago, and it just eeked her a half inch taller than Keith. (And hadn’t _that_ been a revelation, everyone realizing that Keith was technically now the smallest member of the team, though he argued he weighed more than Pidge so it didn’t count. They still revisit the argument when they’re bored.)

“You’ve seriously never hung out here?” Pidge asks, maneuvering them up the narrow metal stairs. “It’s great. No one bothers you and the view’s spectacular.” She gestures to the tall window, beyond which sits the galaxy with its slurry of stars. The Yesif planet is just visible, rotating slowly below them.

“I don’t mind people bothering me,” Hunk says mildly.

“That’s ‘cause you’re nice,” Pidge says. They reach a small pile of electronics Pidge stashes here, and she dumps her armful of blankets and pillows. “Here we go,” she says, helping to lower Hunk to the walkway. “You stay put, I’ll get this set up.” Hunk settles into a cross-legged position and watches, a little blearily, as Pidge arranges a makeshift bed.

“ _You’re_ nice,” Hunk says, voice thick. Pidge blinks at her hands smoothing out a blanket.

“I’m nice when I feel like being nice,” she says. Hunk looks like he wants to argue that point, but he also looks a few minutes from conking out right there.

“No, okay, you’re not always _nice_ , like you don’t always act all warm and fuzzy,” Hunk speaks up after a moment. “But any jerk can act nice so that doesn’t really count. You always care, and that’s the important part.” Pidge glances up; Hunk is watching her in the soft ambient blue light.

“Thanks,” she says, and means it. She plumps the last pillow and knee walks to Hunk. “Come on.”

Hunk crawls into the dinky little bed like it’s a feather mattress in a five star hotel. He settles down with a contented sigh, and Pidge arranges herself near his head, her back pressed against the window and the galaxy beyond that. She sifts through her stashed pile and finds a small, glinting robot she’s been working on. If she can get it to work, she hopes to use it as a tiny spy, crawling undetected into Galra ships and sending back video and audio. Right now, though, it fritzes out whenever it ventures more than twenty feet from Pidge’s laptop.

“I might need your help once you’re feeling up to it,” Pidge muses aloud. “I’m still not sure if my robo spy has a software or hardware issue.”

“Sure,” Hunk murmurs. Pidge reaches out unthinkingly and cards her fingers through Hunk’s thick hair. He sighs again, deep and content. She can feel the relaxation drifting from him. She keeps carding his hair, her other hand clattering over the laptop’s keyboard, while the engine hums at them with utterly comforting white noise. She assumes Hunk has dropped right off to sleep, but a few minutes later, his voice drifts through the dimness again.

“Four years?”

“What?”

“You said you’ve been training for four years. Has it been that long?”

Pidge blinks then looks down at Hunk. “It’s March 21, 2180,” she recites. She’d managed to forget for a few hours, and her gut is twisting uncomfortably again. Hunk is silent for a long stretch.

“My little sister must be in college now,” he says. His voice is carefully empty, and it causes a pang in Pidge’s chest.

“Oh, Hunk, I’m sorry,” she says, leaning over him. “I shouldn’t have opened my fat mouth.”

“I’m not blaming you.” But after a moment, Hunk shifts so that his head bumps up against her thigh. She sets her laptop aside and, with some maneuvering, settles his head in her lap. She keeps up the carding because it seems like the only reliable thing to do.

“How d’you know?” Hunk asks. His voice is small enough to be all but swallowed up by the engine’s hum.

“Coran helped me set up a clock,” Pidge admits. “Years ago. It’s as accurate as we can make it, after time dilation and all that.”

Hunk exhales hard. “I forget about that,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“What if we go home one day and they’re all—“

“No, come on.” Pidge leans over and, on impulse, presses a quick kiss to his temple. “Your sister—Lani, right? What do you think she’s studying?”

Hunk doesn’t answer immediately. “She always liked going to the volcanoes,” he says. “I bet she’s studying that. Volcanoes.”

“I want to meet her when we go back,” Pidge says, bringing a hand to Hunk’s arm and stroking it with her thumb. “And I’ll make her give us a tour of the volcanoes.”

Hunk laughs deep in his throat. “She likes to talk. She’d like that.” They fall into mutual silence because next would come the topic of Pidge’s family and the fact that half of it is flung out in space. But Pidge isn’t going to think about that because Hunk is hurting right now, and she’s supposed to be helping him.

“I miss home,” Hunk says, and it’s spoken so simply and utterly and deeply, and Pidge feels his homesickness as a cold rod straight through her chest. She presses down on his arm out of instinct.

“You remember that yellow shirt I would always wear?” Hunk asks. “The green vest?”

“Yeah,” Pidge says, only realizing now that she hasn’t seen his old Earth clothes in months. He’s been almost exclusively wearing retailored Altean outfits and a few things he’s picked up from other planets.

“I’ve put them in my lock box in my room,” Hunk says. “Because I’m realizing that if they got ruined—burned or stolen or anything—I might honestly have a breakdown. I might—“ he breaks off, and his next inhale is damp. “I sleep with them sometimes because they feel like home.”

He says it like it’s something shameful, and Pidge wants to shake him out of frustration.

“I don’t take out my old headphones anymore,” she murmurs. “Same reason.” She snorts. “My old shirt doesn’t fit me anymore. Pants neither. It’s stupid how much it bums me out, sometimes.”

“Not stupid.”

Pidge shakes her head. “I guess.”

“Well, I _know_.” Hunk twists around so that his forehead is pressed into Pidge’s middle. “We’ll be okay, though,” he murmurs with a slight slur. “We’re watching out for each other, right? We’ll make it back one day.”

Pidge grins—she has no control over it—and bows her head over Hunk. She wants to respond with something equally hopeful, but the words catch in her throat, so she just presses another kiss into his hair and mutters, “Yeah. I know.”

They fall silent, and Pidge contemplates the way the starlight and planet light falls over her hands and Hunk’s back. If she were to turn around, she’d see a whole universe waiting for her, but she doesn’t want anything that huge. She wants to stay here, in this insular space she and Hunk are building for themselves.

She doesn’t realize Hunk has finally drifted to sleep until a soft snore floats up to her. She glances down to her lap, and his face has relaxed. A damp trail is visible on the bridge of his nose, and damn it, if that doesn’t make Pidge’s eyes burn, too.

“We _will_ make it back one day,” she says defiantly, to Hunk, to herself, to the universe at large. “It’ll happen. One day, we’ll go back.”

She's this close to believing it.


End file.
